Product Photographer Matt Jebbia set out with a goal of showing movement in a still object. His inspiration of the beauty product industry shines below in his latest image. Read below for a few words from Matt.
Its well known around the studio that I have a little fetish for beauty products. Not for personal use per se, but I find them a lot of fun to photograph. For one there are so many different varieties, with all kinds of colors, glass, metals, and plastics to choose from. I started a few months ago shooting a couple of Dior products and decided to continue to add to my portfolio with this Dior brush. My goal with this image was to add to the current series of beauty product images centered around the Dior brand and I wanted to add some life to the Dior brush given that it’s a static object.
So I decided to throw some powder onto the brush and blow it away. I started by setting up two rim lights accenting the brush from just behind and to the right and left side of the brush. Studio 3’s photographer – David Bell uses this lighting setup for some of his shoots and I decided it would work perfectly for the image I wanted to create. Adding a small silver reflector in front of the camera added some light to the front of the brush and brought out the silver tones in the brush banding. With the static image in place I added powder to the top of the brush and a Nikon SB 800 speed-light from below to add some light to the powder as I blew it off the brush with canned air. It took a bit of trial and error to get the desired powder bursts, but in the end I loved several of the captures so much I decided to have our amazing digital artists composite several of the powder bursts into the final image. – Matt Jebbia